Bill Gates Biography (William Henry Gates III): Microsoft Founder Chairman Co Chairman, Bill and Melina Gates Foundation The annual Forbes magazine’s list of The World’s Billionaires has ranked Gates as the richest person in the world from 1995 to 2007, with recent estimates putting his net worth over $59 billion USD. 

Early Life of Bill Gates, richest man in the World 

William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, on Oct. 28, 1955 in Washington by William Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His father waa prominent lawyer and his mother was a member of the board of directors for First Interstate Bank and the United Way. His grandfather J.W. Maxwell was a national bank president. “Trey” (Bill Gates’ father had dropped his own III sufix) has one older sister Kristianne and younger sister Libby. Several writers claim that Maxwell set up a million dollar trust fund for Bill. But Bill Gates denied it to one of the biographers who interviewed both Bill and his parents. 

Bill excelled in elementary school, particularly in Mathematics and Science. At thirteen Bill enrolled in the most exclusive preparatory school Lakeside School and when he was in the eigth grade started interest in programming. Because of his expertise he was excused in math classes. Then in there he mastered computer systems.  One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation, which banned the Lakeside students for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.

At the end of the ban, the Lakeside students (Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans) offered to find bugs in CCC’s software in exchange for free computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC’s offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, not only in BASIC but FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language as well. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when it went out of business. The following year Information Sciences Inc. hired the Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them not only computer time but royalties as well. At age 14, Gates also formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. That first year he made $20,000; however, when his age was discovered, business slowed.

As a youth, Bill Gates was active in the Boy Scouts of America where he achieved its second highest rank, Life Scout. According to a press inquiry, Bill Gates stated that he scored 1590 on his SATs. He enrolled at Harvard College in the fall of 1973 intending to get a pre-law degree, but did not have a definite study plan and eventually left without his degree. While at Harvard, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer, whom he later appointed as CEO of Microsoft. At the same time, he co-authored and published a paper on algorithms with computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.